Snyder: Why Your Cases Aren't Settling

Wednesday, August 12, 2020 | 0

Why aren’t your cases settling? In his book, "How to Talk to Strangers," best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell explains that we normally DTT — default to truth — when we receive communication. When we default to lies instead of to truth, we undermine our ability to get to resolution.

Teddy Snyder

The litigation defaults to lies

In almost every facet of our lives, most people take information at face value until something convinces them otherwise. Actually, it’s the only way a society can survive.

Unfortunately, though, Gladwell points out, our default to truth lets people like Bernie Madoff, Jerry Sandusky and simultaneous CIA analyst and Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes perpetrate their crimes. Evidence built up, but the people who received the information rationalized it away.

The other end of the spectrum is when a person suspects everyone of being a liar and treats them that way. Gladwell analyzes the 2015 Texas police handling of the Sandra Bland arrest. Officer Brian Encinia habitually stopped motorists on the thinnest, and sometimes manufactured, pretexts as often as multiple times per hour — an off-the-chart frequency rate. He then found reasons to escalate the situation. The “view everyone with suspicion” philosophy of policing originated as a response to crime in a tiny geographic area, but, Gladwell writes, went out of control.

Litigants are often in the default-to-lie camp. When an adjuster was told a claimant’s position on an issue, the immediate reaction without any further information was, “She’s a liar.” Many claims and litigation professionals default to fight every issue, even when that’s a losing argument.

Transparency is the term for another negotiating problem, though it might be better called non-transparency. Transparency assumes that body language reflects what is going on in a person's mind. An early reaction to remote mediation was an objection to not being able to closely observe someone’s facial expressions and body language. Gladwell documents that we are all very poor at correlating those things, even judges who use observation to set bail and police officers who are trained in assessing facial and body signals.

We humans can have many things going on in our brains at the same time. A facial expression may reflect something going on that has nothing to do with that person’s interaction with us at that moment.

What’s more, different cultural groups use and interpret body language differently. The face 91% of Spaniards identified as angry was seen that way by only 7% of people who lived in the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea.

The lesson

Even when you are sure your evidence unquestionably contradicts your opponent’s position, active listening with an open mind can efficiently lead to settlement. Defaulting to lies does not. 

Attorney Teddy Snyder mediates workers' compensation cases throughout California. She can be contacted through WCMediator.com.